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Ikeshima Island

Hi, everyone.
It’s getting colder in Nagasaki city.

If you have visited Nagasaki city, some of you might have visited Gunkanjima, a.k.a Battleship Island.
Gunkanjima had been known as a coal mine island until 1970.
Now it’s famous as an abandoned place with buildings that look like they are about to corrupt and rusty big machines used for coal mine.

There is another island similar to Gunkanjima.
It’s called Ikeshima island. In Japanese, 池島(いけしま).
Ikeshima was also coal mine island and you can still see abandoned buildings and machines.
But there are still people living there, so the island itself is not exactly abandoned unlike Gunkanjima.
It’s a quite interesting island, so I took a walk around the island the other day.
**Everybody can enter the island without permission or fee.

The port for ferry to Ikeshima is not easy to access unless you have a car.
It takes about 50minutes with a car to get to the port.

I bought a ticket first.
It cost 410yen one way.

It was 15minutes-ride on the ferry.

As I reached the island, I started walking around.

There was a broken motorcycle.
It reminded me that I was on an island with very few people.

The island is also famous for having many many cats.

Many drum cans….

You can see views like this on the island.
Rusty facilities like this one with beautiful sea and field.

Keep walking.
Slopes made me tired.

It’s an area where shops were concentrated.
Now none of them are open…

This one is a school with a big field.
I imagined there were many students playing on this field back in the day.

If you go more forward the school, you will see the apartments area.
This building is covered with leaves, which made it photogenic.

Some pieces of windows are fallen.
There are people living near the port, but in these apartments, nobody lives anymore.

Looks like one scene or set in a movie.

It’s a corridor that made people easy to get across the building.
People didn’t have to take stairs inside the building, but they just came there with a micro bus and go directly to 3rd or 4th floor.
This is because there was no elevator at that time.

I came across this small compartment what looks like it’s used to be an office.
They drew their slogan on the wall in Japanese.

This is a belt conveyer to bring mines to a ship.
But it’s cut halfway.

This one is a machine that carry mines and bring them to the conveyer.
It’s so huge.

There are still cranes and railways without taken care of.

You can see the railway running from the right to the left in the picture.
It used to lead workers to inside coal mine.
There is a sightseeing tour where you can ride a tram and go inside the mine, and get a explanation from tour guides.
In the tour, they let you operate some machines used for digging coal mines.

This one is a tram, but it’s not used anymore.

The island is not that big, so you can circle the island on foot with about an hour-walk. You can see cute goats below.

On the way back to Nagasaki city, you can see this beautiful sunset.
This observatory is located Sotome.

All the places above are a bit hard to access without a car.
But if you have a chance to be in Nagasaki with a car and haven’t decided where to go or want to go somewhere interesting, this island is one of your options.